ESL Writing Prompts by CEFR Level: 60 Tasks and What to Look For
Open the 60 prompts online or download the printable PDF, ten per level from A1 to C2. No sign-up for either.
Most lists of ESL writing prompts are lists of topics. Your favourite holiday. The future of transport. Should homework be banned? They give students something to write about, and then the marking starts from nothing: you read the script, form an impression, and try to turn that impression into a grade and two lines of feedback. Do that for thirty scripts and the impression drifts.
A prompt can do more than give students a topic. The way it's worded decides what language a good answer needs. "Write about your weekend" asks for the past simple. "You ordered something online and it arrived damaged; write to the company and say what you want them to do" asks for a formal register, the passive and a clear request. If you know that before students start writing, you already know what to mark.
That's how this set is built. Each of the 60 writing prompts for ESL students names its text type, gives a target length, and ends with a short Look for line: the structures and features a good answer will use. It's a marking checklist written before the scripts come in.
What changes from A1 to C2
The prompts get longer as the levels go up, but the bigger change is in what the writer is asked to do.
| Level | Typical text types | Target length | What the task asks for |
|---|---|---|---|
| A1 | notes, postcards, profiles, simple descriptions | 20–40 words | give personal facts in simple sentences |
| A2 | short emails, invitations, notes, mini-reviews | 25–60 words | describe, suggest, recount a past event |
| B1 | emails, articles, stories, reviews | about 100 words | organise ideas into paragraphs and give reasons |
| B2 | essays, reports, formal letters, reviews | 140–190 words | argue a position and control register |
| C1 | essays, proposals, reports, references | 220–260 words | evaluate options and persuade a specific reader |
| C2 | summary essays, articles, reviews, reports | 240–320 words | combine sources and sustain a complex argument |
The lengths from A2 up follow the ranges Cambridge English sets for the writing papers at that level (A2 Key, B1 Preliminary, B2 First, C1 Advanced and C2 Proficiency). That makes the set useful for exam classes, but the target length matters in general English classes too. A student told to write "about 100 words" plans differently from one told to "write a paragraph". The A1 range has no exam behind it; it's our suggestion for a first piece of connected writing.
Read down the last column and the progression is clear. At A1 and A2, the task is about the writer: their family, their room, their weekend. At B1 the writer starts addressing someone else, a friend who needs advice or a teacher who needs an apology, and has to organise more than one idea. B2 adds a reader to persuade and a register to hold. By C1 and C2, the writer works with other people's arguments, weighing options and summarising two source texts before adding a view of their own.
That's why a topic list rarely works across levels. "Social media" can be an A2 prompt (what apps do you use, and when?) or a C1 one (is it making us more or less connected?), and what makes them different is the task, not the topic.
The Look for line, and why students should see it
Each prompt ends with something like this, from a B1 email:
Look for: advice structures (You should …, Why don't you …?, If I were you …), so that for purpose.
It isn't a model answer and it isn't the whole marking scheme. It names the two or three language features the task was designed to pull out. A student who writes a helpful, well-organised email without a single advice structure has answered the question, but they've missed the point of the exercise.
Show the line to students before they write. Some teachers worry this is giving the answer away, but it works the other way round: a student who knows the passive is expected in a complaint will plan a sentence that uses it, and a student who doesn't will write around it. Writing around a structure you can't use yet is a sensible strategy in an exam, but in a lesson it means the practice never happens. The line also makes the marking fair: students are judged on what they were told to aim for.
If you mark with a rubric, the Look for line belongs under range and accuracy, the criterion where "did they use the structures this level needs?" lives. The other criteria (task fulfilment, organisation, vocabulary) still apply as normal. How CEFR writing rubrics work explains how those criteria fit together, with a B1 to B2 example.
How to run a writing prompt in class
Read the prompt together, then the Look for line. Ask what each feature would look like in this particular text. For a B2 report, what does "impersonal language" sound like when the topic is the school canteen? Two or three examples on the board are enough.
Two minutes to plan, then write in one go. Students note three or four ideas and the order they'll go in, then write without stopping to check a dictionary. From B1 up, ask for one paragraph per idea. The short plan prevents the most common problem at every level: an answer that covers one point at length and forgets the rest of the task.
Mark against the prompt, not against perfection. First, does the text do everything the prompt asks, at roughly the target length, in the right register? Then, are the Look for features there? Language errors come last, and only the ones that block meaning or that the task was designed to practise. A B1 email that answers all three questions with a few article errors has done its job better than a flawless one that answers two.
Ask for one paragraph again, not the whole text. Mark the one paragraph where the target language was missing or went wrong, and ask for that paragraph to be rewritten. A second draft of one paragraph gets done; a second draft of 250 words usually doesn't. Then move on to a new prompt at the same level so the same features come back in a different task.
A spoken warm-up helps at the lower levels. Five minutes of pair questions on the same topic, such as the ESL conversation questions for the matching level, gets the vocabulary out before anyone has to spell it.
Adapting the prompts for your class
The topics are deliberately ordinary: a lost bag, a friend visiting, a canteen, a four-day week. That makes them easy to change without breaking the task. Swap the canteen for the library and the B2 report still needs headings, impersonal language and recommendations.
For ESL writing prompts for adults, the B1 and B2 sets already lean that way: emails to a manager, a job application, a complaint to a company, advice to a friend choosing between courses. The A1 and A2 prompts work for adults with small changes, such as a note to a colleague instead of a classmate.
For teenagers, keep the text type and the Look for line and change the situation. The B2 article "Is social media making us more or less connected?" needs no change at all; a C1 proposal for a mentoring scheme can become a proposal to the head teacher for a student-run club.
For mixed-level classes, print the ESL writing prompts PDF and let students choose one prompt from their own level. Students choosing from the same page, each at their own level, is a lot easier to run than handing out three different worksheets.
When you run out of prompts
Sixty prompts is a term or two of writing for one class, less if you teach several groups at the same level. Two things make them last longer.
The first is reuse. A prompt that worked with one class will usually work with the next, so save it rather than rewriting it from memory. Assignment templates are built for this: save once, then load the task, its level and its grading setup next term.
The second is generating new ones. In Writing, no kidding, the New Assignment page has a Writing Task with an AI panel that drafts a prompt from a topic at the CEFR level you set. You can grade the work against CEFR, Cambridge B2 First, or a rubric you've saved. The AI drafts the feedback on what students hand in, and you review it and have the final say before anything goes back to a student (why that matters). If marking time is the real bottleneck, how long it takes to grade ESL essays puts numbers on it, and the AI essay grading overview for ESL teachers shows how the suite handles it.
Whichever way you go, the marking will show which features keep going wrong across a class, and your common mistake patterns are the best guide to which level and which prompts to come back to.
Download and use
The full set is free and needs no account:
- ESL writing prompts online: all 60 prompts, grouped by CEFR level, each with its text type, target length and Look for line.
- Printable PDF: A4, black and white, five pages, the same 60 prompts grouped by level, ready to photocopy.
FAQ
What makes a good ESL writing prompt? A good prompt names the text type, the reader and the length, and is worded so that a good answer needs specific language at the right level. "Write an email to your teacher apologising for missing a lesson and asking what to catch up on" is a better B1 prompt than "write about being ill", because it calls for a semi-formal register and polite requests.
How long should ESL students' writing be at each level? In this set: 20–40 words at A1, 25–60 at A2, about 100 at B1, 140–190 at B2, 220–260 at C1 and 240–320 at C2. The ranges from A2 up follow the Cambridge English writing papers for those levels; the A1 range is a suggestion for a first connected text.
Should students see the marking criteria before they write? Yes. Showing the Look for line first makes students plan for the target language instead of writing around it, and it means they're marked on what they were told to aim for.
Can I use these prompts with adult learners? Yes. Many of the B1 and B2 prompts are already adult situations (job applications, complaints, workplace reports), and the lower-level ones adapt with small changes to the setting.
Written by Prof. Vito Schiuma, designer of English, no kidding.